THE DAYBREAK CALL
_John Williams_ (Date of Incident, 1839)
Two men leaned on the rail of the brig _Camden_ as she swept slowly
along the southern side of the Island of Erromanga in the Western
Pacific. A steady breeze filled her sails. The sea heaved in long,
silky billows. The red glow of the rising sun was changing to the
full, clear light of morning.
The men, as they talked, scanned the coast-line closely. There was the
grey, stone-covered beach, and, behind the beach, the dense bush and
the waving fronds of palms. Behind the palms rose the volcanic hills
of the island. The elder man straightened himself and looked keenly to
the bay from which a canoe was swiftly gliding.
He was a broad, sturdy man, with thick brown hair over keen watchful
eyes. His open look was fearless and winning. His hands, which grasped
the rail, had both the strength and the skill of the trained mechanic
and the writer. For John Williams could build a ship, make a boat and
sail them both against any man in all the Pacific. He could work with
his hammer at the forge in the morning, make a table at his joiner's
bench in the afternoon, preach a powerful sermon in the evening, and
write a chapter of the most thrilling of books on missionary travel
through the night. Yet next morning would see him in his ship, with
her sails spread, moving out into the open Pacific, bound for a
distant island.
"It is strange," Williams was saying to his friend Mr. Cunningham,
"but I have not slept all through the night."
How came it that this man, who for over twenty years had faced
tempests by sea, who had never flinched before perils from savage men
and from fever, on the shores of a hundred islands in the South Seas,
should stay awake all night as his ship skirted the strange island of
Erromanga?
It was because, having lived for all those years among the coral
islands of the brown Polynesians of the Eastern Pacific, he was now
sailing to the New Hebrides, where the fierce black cannibal islanders
of the Western Pacific slew one another. As he thought of the fierce
men of Erromanga he thought of the waving forests of brown hands he
had seen, the shouts of "Come back again to us!" that he had heard
as he left his own islands. He knew how those people loved him in the
Samoan Islands, but he could not rest while others lay far off who
had never heard the story of Jesus. "I cannot be content," he said,
"within the narrow limits of a single reef."
But the black islanders were wild men who covered their dark faces
with soot and painted their lips with flaming red, yet their cruel
hearts were blacker than their faces, and their anger more fiery than
their scarlet lips. They were treacherous and violent savages who
would smash a skull by one blow with a great club; or leaping on a man
from behind, would cut through his spine with a single stroke of their
tomahawks, and then drag him off to their cannibal oven.
John Williams cared so much for his work of telling the islanders
about God their Father, that he lay awake wondering how he could
carry it on among these wild people. It never crossed his mind that
he should hold back to save himself from danger. It was for this work
that he had crossed the world.
"Let down the whale-boat." His voice rang out without a tremor of
fear. His eyes were on the canoe in which three black Erromangans were
paddling across the bay. As the boat touched the water, he and the
crew of four dropped into her, with Captain Morgan and two friends,
Harris and Cunningham. The oars dipped and flashed in the morning sun
as the whale-boat flew along towards the canoe. When they reached it,
Williams spoke in the dialects of his other islands, but none could
the three savages in the canoe understand. So he gave them some beads
and fish-hooks as a present to show that he was a friend and again his
boat shot away toward the beach.
They pulled to a creek where a brook ran down in a lovely valley
between two mountains. On the beach stood some Erromangan natives,
with their eyes (half fierce, half frightened) looking out under their
matted jungle of hair.
Picking up a bucket from the boat, Williams held it out to the chief
and made signs to show that he wished for water from the brook. The
chief took the bucket, and, turning, ran up the beach and disappeared.
For a quarter of an hour they waited; and for half an hour. At last,
when the sun was now high in the sky, the chief returned with the
water.
Williams drank from the water to show his friendliness. Then his
friend, Harris, swinging himself over the side of the boat, waded
ashore through the cool, sparkling, shallow water and sat down. The
natives ran away, but soon came back with cocoa-nuts and opened them
for him to drink.
* * * * *
"See," said Williams, "there are boys playing on the beach; that is a
good sign."
"Yes," answered Captain Morgan, "but there are no women, and when the
savages mean mischief they send their women away."
Williams now waded ashore and Cunningham followed him. Captain Morgan
stopped to throw out the anchor of his little boat and then stepped
out and went ashore, leaving his crew of four brown islanders resting
on their oars.
Williams and his two companions scrambled up the stony beach over
the grey stones and boulders alongside the tumbling brook for over a
hundred yards. Turning to the right they were lost to sight from the
water-edge. Captain Morgan was just following them when he heard a
terrified yell from the crew in the boat.
Williams and his friends had gone into the bush, Harris in front,
Cunningham next, and Williams last. Suddenly Harris, who had
disappeared in the bush, rushed out followed by yelling savages with
clubs. Harris rushed down the bank of the brook, stumbled, and fell
in. The water dashed over him, and the Erromangans, with the red fury
of slaughter in their eyes, leapt in and beat in his skull with clubs.
Cunningham, with a native at his heels with lifted club, stooped,
picked up a great pebble and hurled it full at the savage who was
pursuing him. The man was stunned. Turning again, Cunningham leapt
safely into the boat.
Williams, leaving the brook, had rushed down the beach to leap into
the sea. Reaching the edge of the water, where the beach falls steeply
into the sea, he slipped on a pebble and fell into the water.
Cunningham, from the boat, hurled stones at the natives rushing at
Williams, who lay prostrate in the water with a savage over him with
uplifted club. The club fell, and other Erromangans, rushing in, beat
him with their clubs and shot their arrows into him until the ripples
of the beach ran red with his blood.
The hero who had carried the flaming torch of peace on earth to
the savages on scores of islands across the great Pacific Ocean was
dead--the first martyr of Erromanga.
* * * * *
When _The Camden_ sailed back to Samoa, scores of canoes put out to
meet her. A brown Samoan guided the first canoe.
"Missi William," he shouted.
"He is dead," came the answer.
The man stood as though stunned. He dropped his paddle; he drooped his
head, and great tears welled out from the eyes of this dark islander
and ran down his cheeks.
The news spread like wildfire over the islands, and from all
directions came the natives crying in multitudes:
"Aue,[21] Williamu, Aue, Tama!" (Alas, Williams, Alas, our Father!)
And the chief Malietoa,[22] coming into the presence of Mrs. Williams,
cried:
"Alas, Williamu, Williamu, our father, our father! He has turned his
face from us! We shall never see him more! He that brought us the good
word of Salvation is gone! O cruel heathen, they know not what they
did! How great a man they have destroyed!"
John Williams, the torch-bearer of the Pacific, whom the brown
men loved, the great pioneer, who dared death on the grey beach
of Erromanga, sounds a morning bugle-call to us, a Reveillè to our
slumbering camps:
"The daybreak call,
Hark how loud and clear I hear it sound; Swift to your places, swift
to the head of the army, Pioneers, O Pioneers!"[23]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: A-oo-ay.]
[Footnote 22: M[)a]-lee-ay-to-[)a].]
[Footnote 23: Walt Whitman.]